A few Russian information warfare news tidbits caught my attention:
Russian troll describes work in the infamous misinformation factory
Fusion GPS Glenn Simpson: Russians ‘infiltrated the NRA’
Trump-Russia inquiry is told Nigel Farage may have given Julian Assange data
It’s obvious that the investigations into Trump/Russian collusion, the Clinton/GPS Fusion/FBI, and the 2016 mass media information war are not going to end soon.
Filed under General Interest, Information War, Politics
After mentioning Ulysses S. Grant in my latest blog posts, I decided I should read his autobiography, The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. His autobiography is easily available free online. Amazon has several formats, and in digital format they have a 6-part free version:
The Gutenberg Library has a free online version here.
Bartleby has free version online too – here.
Often many interesting facets to the character and lives of important political figures get buried under the smears used by their political rivals and detractors. Grant is probably more widely known for his reputation as a drunk than as the general who led the Union to victory.
Just a bit of casual googling in the past few days and I learned that besides being a former U.S president and general, Grant was also an accomplished watercolor artist.
Recently, I learned that Karen Pence, wife of vice president, Mike Pence, is also an accomplished watercolor artist and has made promoting art therapy programs to help trauma victims a cause she’ll use her position as second lady to promote. The liberal media has painted her as a far-right, Christian zealot so often that I found it interesting to find out she’s an artist, but even more interesting, she’s a trained pilot:
“Karen comes from a family of pilots. “I was born on an Air Force base,” Karen said on Afternoons With Amos, a radio show. “My dad worked for United Airlines. I kind of grew up around planes. My godfather had his own plane, and when I was a teenager, I got to fly with him and it just kind of got in my blood.”
Although her license is not current, her son Michael has the flying gene. “My son, though, has taken me out because he’s a pilot now, he’s actually an instructor,” she said in the interview.”
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a62233/karen-pence-facts/
The more facets we take the time to see in people, especially people who have been tarred by the media, the easier it is to see them more as sparkling diamonds than as cheap paste jewelry. Most people defy cookie-cutter descriptions. Most are complex, with many experiences and interesting tidbits to share. You can enrich your own life greatly by taking the time to get to know them.
Hope everyone has a nice day and let’s be thankful that yesterday’s missile alarm warning in Hawaii was a false alarm.
Filed under General Interest, History, Military
Senator Ben Sasse posted this inspiring video on social media today. It’s a much-needed blast of American spirit, to cleanse the air of the latest Twitter SPIN battle.
While the American media and President Trump fall into another SPIN “shithole”, today’s blog post is not going to be about politics. Some Democrats, after a meeting with Trump, decided to attempt another #Resist Trump takedown spin effort. The mainstream liberal media went into full hysteria mode last night… again… about “Trump is a racist”.
I had been working on a junk journal last night and didn’t look at Twitter until close to midnight. It took me about 30 seconds of scrolling through journalists’ tweets to assess a full-blown #Resist SPIN attack underway. By this morning, a great deal of the liberal Twitter shitstorm over “shitholes” was so over-the-top, that it’s clear they may, once again, end up bolstering Trump rather than taking him down.
Many of the #Resisters, who pretend to be objective journalists, sound like hysterical lunatics.
The altered book junk journal I am working on is for my youngest daughter. I found this lovely scrapbook paper at Hobby Lobby a few weeks ago, when they had this brand of paper on sale for 50% off. The background is actually a skirt my youngest daughter sewed in her early teens. She loved this dark navy fabric with the lobster print, even though I was trying to steer her toward pretty pastel colored fabric. We found an easy skirt pattern and she sewed several pretty floral print skirts and this lobster print skirt, needing very little assistance, once she did a little bit of practice sewing on scrap fabric to get the hang of machine sewing. I came across this skirt in the spare bedroom closet recently and my mind flew to thinking it would be great to repurpose it as a junk journal cover and possibly use more of it to make a tote bag for her too.
The picture above is one of my favorite childhood books, that I came across looking through old books for junk journaling. It’s pretty beat-up and has pen scribbles on it, that I know I didn’t put there. I know this, because I wrote my name inside the front cover of my books and did not scribble or write in them. When I got to college and first observed the habit of using highlighter markers in your textbooks, well, I was appalled that people would deface their books like that. I never got into the habit of “highlighting” or writing in my books and I tried to take good care of my books. And of course, bending down page corners to mark your place in a book should be punishable with a good smack upside the head.
Book collecting (hoarding) is a lifelong habit, that I will never quit, although I’ve tried to read more kindle books and buy less actual books in recent years. Sadly, my same book hoarding habits easily transferred to digital hoarding too. My bookmarks always are out of control, same with the other crap I download and my Pinterest has over 200 boards and over 12,000 pins… I have pinned way more recipes and craft projects than I can ever use, but I still keep pinning more.
Anyone else have this “hoarding” problem with digital information?
One of my happiest memories of my early years of school was receiving my Scholastic Book Club flyer from my teacher, pouring over every book listing, then compiling my “wish list”. Usually my list contained almost every book in the flyer. My mother would give me money for books and then I had to sit there and decide which books I wanted the most, to fit my small book allowance. I bought Codes & Secret Writing when I was around 10 years old and it fueled my interest in cryptography. Learning about its use in warfare led to my interest in military strategy. I also liked reading mystery genre stories, as a kid, which often involved strange happenings or odd people rather than the more common adult crime detective mysteries.
Truth be told, I was never very good at codes and ciphers and I found military strategy much more my cup of tea.
Another of my favorite childhood book genres was biographies of great or famous people. I still like reading about important people in history, but I prefer a narrower selection now, opting to read biographies about people whose lives and/or ideas impacted history in some profound way. I also moved toward trying to read the person’s own writings and letters whenever possible, rather than relying on a biographer or historian’s assessment. This habit grew out of observing that too often historians seem to work from having already decided on the character of the historical figure they are writing about and using their research to cherry pick historical documentation to bolster their preconceived character assessment.
In comments on my last blog post, JK provided links to several very interesting John Batchelor interviews with historians, H.W. Brands, Ron Chernow and Robert L.O’Connell on two fascinating and controversial historical figures, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. It’s interesting that two of the most important generals in the Union winning the U.S. Civil War ended up with their characters frequently extremely maligned, yet Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederate forces, trying to tear the United States apart, has consistently been recast as a saintly man of conviction and the “better” general, even though he lost…
I honestly believe that at the core of the perceptions of Grant and Lee lies a class bias, where Lee obviously had the pedigree of a Southern aristocrat and Grant came from a hardscrabble working class background. It’s much easier to place Lee, with his impeccable personal appearance and stately bearing, as a majestic war hero on a statue than it is Grant, with his rumpled clothes and lack of a commanding presence.
On a day when America’s politicos continue to furiously tweet on about Trump’s shithole comment, it’s important to remember that America’s greatness lies in our commitment to the belief in the power of freedom to transform the lives of individuals. It’s not where you came from, the color of your skin, your religion, or sex; it’s about believing that in America you are free, to borrow Emerson’s line, “Hitch your wagon to a star.”
Here’s a 2016 Marco Rubio quote that I came across in an Ian Tuttle piece at National Review, which sums up America eloquently:
“We are a hopeful people, and we have every right to be hopeful. For we in this nation are the descendants of go-getters. In our veins runs the blood of people who gave it all up so we would have the chances they never did. We are all the descendants of someone who made our future the purpose of their lives. We are the descendants of pilgrims. We are the descendants of settlers. We are the descendants of men and women that headed westward in the Great Plains not knowing what awaited them. We are the descendants of slaves who overcame that horrible institution to stake their claim in the American Dream. We are the descendants of immigrants and exiles who knew and believed that they were destined for more, and that there was only one place on earth where that was possible.”
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432928/americas-pioneer-spirit-dead-gone
I wish Trump and his enemies waging these Tweetstorm battles would call a truce to this destructive information war, but each side believes they’re “saving” America, even though their SPIN battles deepen the partisan divides in America, incite rage, and fray the bonds of civil society. You don’t need to understand any secret codes or ciphers to see how damaging SPIN is to America, all you need to do is listen to the Trump vs. the Media news a few minutes a day.
It’s depressing to think that this is what the world believes America is all about…
Filed under American Character, General Interest, Information War, Inspirations, Politics
The Clinton/Obama/Dems/mainstream media coalition vs. Trump information war drags on and Trump continues to confound his enemies, who still react in dismay that he is still in office.
Both sides remain very committed to continuing the fight. Trump often seems to act on gut instinct, instantaneously reading his enemies’ motives way more clearly than his enemies read him. Trump learned his enemies’ information warfare strategy, but his enemies have no real understanding of how Trump won the election or how to counter his strategy.
Yesterday, I read an editorial piece by Josh Marshall, Thoughts on the Greatness of Ulysses S. Grant, at TPM, which made me think about how Trump is still standing, despite the relentless information war being unleashed against him. The piece is very interesting, so put aside your partisan blinders and read Marshall’s thoughtful views on Grant’s leadership and writing. He offered some insights into Grant’s leadership, that I had never thought about before. Marshall writes about Grant’s transformational military leadership and the ways in which Grant threw the traditional military playbook out the window and experimented with maneuver warfare, but even more interesting than that insight, Marshall explains a theory of military operations, which Grant intuitively utilized to great advantage, even though the theory was not developed until a century later. Marshall writes:
“A century later, a military intellectual and US Air Force Colonel named John Boyd developed a theory of military operations known by the shorthand “OODA loops.” OODA stands for the process of Observe – Orient – Decide – Act, a framework to think about the constant interaction between our observation of our environment and the decisions we make in how to respond to it. Boyd’s insight was that if a combatant can move through this cycle sufficiently faster than an adversary he can get inside his opponent’s ‘OODA loops’. Specifically, if you can move rapidly enough from observation to decision and action, you can change the environment your opponent has observed while they are still deciding how to react to it.That causes a cycle of missteps and confusion leading to defeat. Boyd, a fighter pilot, developed his theory around aviation dogfights. But without the acronyms, game theory and mathematics, it was a similar insight that was allowing Grant to see the impact of mobility in defeating his opponents. Speed is not simply the pace at which actions occur. Sufficient speed changes the nature of those actions or, more specifically, changes the reactions to them and in so doing changes them as well.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thoughts-on-the-greatness-of-ulysses-s-grant
Marshall devotes a good portion of his piece to explaining the importance of writing reflecting clarity of vision and thought. He asserts Grant’s writing reflects an amazing clarity and ability to express himself concisely, which is assuredly more important than style and fancy phrasing in a military leader.
While President Trump is in no way a military genius and it’s a safe bet he has never read either Grant’s autobiography or about Boyd’s OODA loops, Trump has an intuitive genius (yes, I hesitated using that word in relation to Trump) for throwing his political enemies off-balance and for controlling the information battlefield, which the Left learned to dominate and control using the sycophantic, liberal mainstream media to disseminate and saturate the media reporting with talking points, narratives, memes, all designed to manipulate and control public opinion.
For decades the SPIN form of information warfare has allowed the Left to easily and successfully manipulate public opinion and reinforce it, by relentless repetition of the short talking points messaging filled with buzz words, which was then used to manufacture public opinion polling. The polling, which was really the result of what amounted to mass media brainwashing, with the repetitive spin, was sold as the definitive marker on what Americans believe and it was used to marginalize conservatives and political opinions that deviated from the Left’s spin.
Trump’s opponents keep recycling through their tired spin attacks (his taxes, his lying, Russian collusion, his mental instability, the sexual predation allegations), but they keep failing to take him down. Although most of Trump’s attacks are petty, filled with lies, often sound unhinged, and more often than not, are rather sloppily written tweets, what Trump has done is completely break through the Left’s lock on controlling the SPIN cycle.
Observing Trump’s use of Twitter and his public speaking, it’s easy to dismiss Trump as a loudmouth, know nothing, corrupt, lying, reprehensible excuse of a leader. His leadership, especially his penchant for playing even his own team members against each other, is assuredly toxic leadership, but when it comes to using his vastly smaller media platforms to fight the Left’s massively larger and powerful forces, Trump has learned to use his own charismatic showmanship to demolish their carefully constructed spin attacks and completely control the 24/7 news cycle, mostly using just his personal Twitter account and a handful of tweets a day. He doesn’t rely on drafting cumbersome, focus group-tested wording or emailing talking points, then disseminating to thousands of operatives and friendly media Leftists.
Trump does watch a lot of TV news, which the Left is using to discredit Trump, but what they don’t understand is he watches and then, without giving away his next move, he tweets or makes a few public statements, which invariably throw the Left’s carefully orchestrated spin attacks into disarray. Trump has an innate sense for how to manipulate the media, but he has a genius for getting inside his opponents’ OODA loops, leaving them scrambling and stuck recycling through their old spin attacks, while he has completely moved ahead of them and owned their information platforms.
Winning an information war is not about having the best “spin” or vast information platforms that far outmatch your opponents, it’s about understanding people and understanding the things that they care about. Trump understands people and he has a canny knack for manipulating people.
Trump spins faster and more effectively than his enemies and he has demolished the Left’s control of America’s media information platforms… using mostly a free, personal Twitter account. He doesn’t rely on expensive focus groups or fancy data experts; he trusts his own instincts.
Trump has broken through the Left’s information warfare OODA loops.
He broke through and demolished their SPIN cycle.
Whether he can win the information war remains to be seen, but he has the Left off-balance and in a constant state of panic, regrouping and recycling failed talking points messaging.
Filed under General Interest, Information War, Military, Politics, The Media, Twitter Tales
This morning I woke up to icicles on my magnolia tree, which is a rare sight here in coastal Georgia. The freezing rain has now turned to snow and there’s even a little bit on the ground.
It’s rather funny how Southerners react to a little bit of ice and snow. The local school and business closure announcements started in the early afternoon yesterday. Last night the governor of Georgia declared a state of emergency before this storm even hit. One of my dogs reacts like a typical Southerner too. She slipped on the icy patio, which scared her and then she stood in the back yard, barking at the falling snow, as if she’d lost her mind. She’s definitely a Southern belle personality… bless her heart (Southern code language intended).
In over 20 years of living here, most years we don’t even see so much as a snowflake, so I’ve been enjoying sitting here looking out the window watching the snow.
Of course, old habits die-hard, so I’ve been reading the news too. One of the most annoying things about the mainstream media is how they report, using Obama hacks, as if these are credible, unbiased sources on policy, especially foreign policy.
The Obama administration’s default foreign policy position was a fearful crouch and endless foot-dragging before making any decisions. President Obama and his administration bowed and scraped to America’s adversaries for 8 long years and our adversaries read that as American weakness. The Russians, Iranians, and Chinese began to escalate at harassing American Armed Forces in international territory, at sea and in the air. President Obama did nothing to dissuade their aggression.
The worst moment, was in January 2016, when Iran captured two American vessels and American sailors, whom they videotaped and photographed for propaganda that was demoralizing to America’s military. Then Secretary of State, John Kerry, took credit for the release of our sailors, but he THANKED Iran for their “care” of our sailors and tried to play this national embarrassment and humiliation off as some sort of great diplomatic victory.
And therein lies the problem. The Obama administration, with the mainstream media selling the Obama narrative, sold this event as a Obama foreign policy “success”, instead of reporting the truth. The truth is the Iranians violated international law, both capturing our sailors and using them for propaganda purposes. The Obama administration’s failure to defend America’s military, but instead to kowtow to Iran and then THANK the Iranians was bordering very close to traitorous behavior. The Obama response was not a diplomatic victory in any sense.
It was a national disgrace!
However, the mainstream media seemed completely unaware that the Obama administration handling was a disgrace and even worse they sold the Obama narrative that this was a Obama foreign policy success. It was a total lie.
That the mainstream media both bought into every Obama narrative and sold it brings me to the present. They continue to pedal every bit of spin the Obama hacks (always identified as former foreign policy officials or intelligence experts) spew. The mainstream media also portrays highly politicized former Obama intelligence officials, James Clapper and John Brennan, as if they are unbiased sources, when they played starring roles in every Obama foreign policy debacle.
This same mainstream media penchant for their “trusted sources” applies to Hillary’s email server investigation, where their default source for fact-checking is former FBI director, James Comey.
Comey with his obsession to burnish his image as that of heroic fighter for truth, with tweets like, “But justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” Amos 5:24, tirelessly works to bolster his carefully cultivated public image as James The Sanctimonious Truth-teller, but is he really?
I’ll answer my own rhetorical question: “NO!” Comey went along with the Obama narrative to bury Hillary’s email server scandal. Nothing about his July 2016 email server statement made sense. He listed CRIMES, then spent the second half of his statement trivializing those crimes, which he stated had been committed. And as he was speaking, President Obama and Hillary were on Air Force One jetting away to a campaign stop… Just another of their “time to move on” moments, which the media aided in pushing off the front page headlines..
Yet, the mainstream media always quotes Comey as an unimpeachable source.
You don’t need to watch FOX News to become jaded on the mainstream media reporting. All you have to do is consume mainstream media news with some objectivity. President Trump is not the only one who lives on Twitter. Most of the mainstream media folks live there 24/7. And even more obnoxious than Trump’s tweets are the Obama hacks breathlessly tweeting about how everything Trump does is “unprecedented” and how Obama’s foreign policy was perfect…
January 3rd and a blog post on politics already…
I need to do better working on my good intentions.
Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Politics
Fire crackers! Don’t know how I could live in GA over 20 years and never have tried fire crackers. My son brought some home at Christmas, which his friend made, so I looked on Pinterest for a recipe. Super simple really, but I will be changing to canola oil, instead of the olive oil next time and I will cut the red pepper flakes down to about a third or less than the recipe calls for. These are way too hot for me to handle. Here’s the recipe I followed.
Happy New Year!
The end of one year and beginning of another always involves being bombarded with a media glut of retrospection on the year that was. It also leaves us buried under piles of advice on making New Year’s resolutions, keeping them and all sorts of advice on how to transform our lives.
Last year at this time I decided that I wanted to take my blog in a direction away from politics, hopefully moving toward topics that were more meaningful to me (and hopefully to some who read my blog). America’s “greatest” reality TV show eclipsed my good intentions and I found myself, more often than not, writing about America’s reality TV presidency and our endless mass media information war, that still burns hot.
In my own daily life none of that political drama has affected me in any noticeable ways. In fact, few political events, except for very dramatic ones, things like war or the complete collapse of our government, would really create mass chaos in American daily life, I suspect. We are blessed to live in a stable republic, with a private economy that chugs along, through good times and bad. Most Americans, even those living in the lower-income brackets, live with more material goods than even the wealthiest Americans had when our country was founded.
This year, I intend to stick to my New Year’s blog resolution and move away from the domestic political sideshow more often.
Wishing all a very Happy New Year!
Libertybelle
Filed under Blog Notes, General Interest
image courtesy of : https://thegraphicsfairy.com/vintage-new-year-sled-image-cute
Filed under General Interest
Image courtesy of : https://thegraphicsfairy.com/vintage-christmas-bunnies-darling/
Filed under General Interest
“All’s well in the world when you’re baking cookies. ”
– libertybelle
PS: My son helped bake these today.
Filed under General Interest
Just when you think the Me Too witches can’t get any lamer, they prove you wrong. Now, they are demanding an investigation into Trump’s “groping” and the always arrogant Kristen Gillibrand is demanding that President Trump resign. This is a pretty lame scorched earth gambit, but it demonstrates that they overplayed the #RussianCollusion effort and that is imploding. Gillibrand claims there are numerous credible allegations, but they spun one over the weekend that blew up in their face. They were hysterically tweeting that in 2005-2006 Trump took former FOX News host, Juliet Huddy, to lunch and tried to kiss her in the elevator.
In 2005-2006, Trump was just a rich playboy, this did not happen in the workplace or while he was in office – it sounded like a date.
It bombed and by this morning Huddy was claiming the media exaggerated her account in an interview. Only problem is she is into this Me Too fainting couch hysterics too and she is the one who gave the media this story. These women are so phony. Liberal women who promoted rampant promiscuity for decades are now acting like Puritans and it’s so laughable and ridiculous. They are really trivializing real cases of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace. They are hyping “groping” allegations from parties and other social events, where these liberal women have promoted indiscriminate sex for years. They are deplorable, vile hypocrites.
The allegations against former president, George HW Bush had me fuming too. He’s 92, in a wheelchair and has diminishing function due to Parkinson’s. Either the witches of Me Too or the Roger Stone sewer rats tossed out this allegation to score some cheap political points. I suspect Bush 41 has some dementia too. To trash a man, who dedicated his life to public service and was a WWII war hero, should cause these vile people shame, but I doubt they care about anything more than their political games.
Trump will jump right into the sewer with them, so on it goes.
I have been crafting more. I made the above junk journal from another repurposed Ann Coulter book. I will be glad when all of those are sanitized into something pretty, lol. This one is for my best friend from high school. My friend used to collect Precious Moments figurines, but I didn’t have any Precious Moments pictures, so I used my old 2006 Holly Hobbie calendar and a picture from an old Mary Engelbreit calendar. Here are some more pictures from this junk journal:
I also started working on some collage junk, that I work on while reading Twitter droppings:
I made these 3 with just one page of one of my kids beat-up Little Golden Books and scraps of paper.
I also finished this plastic canvas tissue box cover and started another one – have 3 sides done, while reading Twitter:
I like using these same easy quilt patterns, because they are quick to stitch and I think they are pretty.
Not sure where America’s scorched earth info war ends, but the #Resist crowd is getting desperate, so I expect more poorly thought out scorched earth attacks. They really have no idea how ridiculous they sound. Sadly, many women, even Republican women will jump on board this lunacy, because they buy into so much of the feminist false narratives. The other things is almost every woman has experienced some incident of sexual harassment or uncomfortable sexual advances from a man. The very anything goes culture that these liberals created has now reached a point where so many women are angry, so many men and women have no manners, no sexual boundaries and it’s a wasteland. They don’t like the world they created, so they will try to impose new rules.
A reality about women is that they are catty as hell, by nature, easily join cliques, and engage in a lot of petty fights. Sure, some women don’t, but many do, especially ones with big egos. Another fact about women, is they have loyalty issues and can switch sides in fights, often several times in one day. I have observed this behavior, my entire life and I live in the real world, not the feminist delusional one. Women are also prone to petty jealousies, especially if men are involved. So, this will certainly be quite a spectacle I have always preferred to work with men, who are more apt to work toward a mission. I like being committed to a mission, with none of the drama.
America is now entering The War On Men…
Lord, help us all…
Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, Twitter Tales
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